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Insane state of today's advertising part 3

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Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#111

Post by boundlessdreamz »

jdangu wrote: post #76

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN. At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of our prime targets, we block millions of their ad impressions daily. They are essentially buying cheap display ad placements to resell them as fake video preroll ad placements. They sell on video exchanges like AOL's AdapTV and others. To maximize their yield,…

> fake video preroll ad placements

Can you explain this further? Who is getting defrauded here?

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#112

Post by mmmpop »

alphapapa wrote: post #92
jdangu wrote: post #76

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN. At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of our prime targets, we block millions of their ad impressions daily. They are essentially buying cheap display ad placements to resell them as fake video preroll ad placements. They sell on video exchanges like AOL's AdapTV and others. To maximize their yield,…

Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser. > We're on a mission to drive them out of business But if you succeed, won't you go out of business? It's like antivirus vendors: if there were no malware, there'd be no need for AV software. How do you remain ethical? If you win, will you close up shop?

I think that "effectively rid the world of shitty ad fraudsters" is a strong credential in one's CV. Jobs won't be hard to find!

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#115

Post by iamaelephant »

p49k wrote: post #72
allanbreyes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never quite understood why domain-blocking works so well for ad-blockers. I'm surprised why sites don't just use a reverse proxy or something to serve from those ad domains. What am I missing?

Advertisers/ad networks need to serve ads from their own domains so that they can identify the visitor via 3rd-party cookies and serve the most appropriate ad.

No, they don't "need" to do that. Not any more than newspaper, magazine or television advertisers "need" to know anything about the individuals seeing the ad, beyond the target demographic of the publication. They do it because there's money in it, but if website owners could put the welfare of their customers ahead of the relentless pursuit of profit by serving manually curated, static, untargeted ads we could have a much nicer web.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#116

Post by samplatt »

alphapapa wrote: post #92
jdangu wrote: post #76

Awesome to see that subject #1 on HN. At my startup Confiant [1], we block bad ads in stream on behalf of publishers. Cedato aka Algovid aka TLVMedia is one of our prime targets, we block millions of their ad impressions daily. They are essentially buying cheap display ad placements to resell them as fake video preroll ad placements. They sell on video exchanges like AOL's AdapTV and others. To maximize their yield,…

Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser. > We're on a mission to drive them out of business But if you succeed, won't you go out of business? It's like antivirus vendors: if there were no malware, there'd be no need for AV software. How do you remain ethical? If you win, will you close up shop?

>Good grief, it's like an invisible war going on inside your browser.

I find it incredibly interesting that the evolutionary-arms-race of ads and viruses versus blockers is mimicking the development of actual genetic evolution.

There's that XKCD comic that mentions if you want to look at 20 years of code evolution, look the source for the google homepage. Now imagine what your genetic code looks like after 800 million years.

I don't have any insight or education to back me up here, but I believe that even if we were to re-engineer the internet from the ground up we'd still get an evolutionary arms race, simply because a space with potential to exploit a system will always exist.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#117

Post by HuginnMuninn »

brad0 wrote: post #71
HuginnMuninn wrote: post #56

Has anyone attempted to quantify a rough cost for me to just pay for the http request I'm making and get rid of the middlemen? I look at some of my spur of the moment purchases in shame, yet paying say $0.001 to browse a page somehow is the unthinkable? Most don't like ads, as others have said they add latency and are easily subject to fraudulent clicks for the advertiser. I get the feeling that content-creators and…

I quite like this idea. I run a basic http server with a nodejs backend. It gets ~3000 hits a month. It costs around $6 on AWS. It costs around 0.2c per request. It would be simple to build a system that charges per use - most SaaS companies do this. The problem is that someone is willing to pay for that content and repost it on the "free web". 99% of people will read the free version (see freemium mobile games). Whi…

Excellent points. Seems I was oversimplifying a single part of a bigger problem.

I want to pay, but never feel satisfied with time-based subscription models, especially for news, would be so happy to pay upfront for 1000 articles, no time limit, yet to see that offered.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#118

Post by HuginnMuninn »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #75
HuginnMuninn wrote: post #56

Has anyone attempted to quantify a rough cost for me to just pay for the http request I'm making and get rid of the middlemen? I look at some of my spur of the moment purchases in shame, yet paying say $0.001 to browse a page somehow is the unthinkable? Most don't like ads, as others have said they add latency and are easily subject to fraudulent clicks for the advertiser. I get the feeling that content-creators and…

https://contributor.google.com/v/beta Alternatively, you could set up a bidder that bids for inventory that has paying customers' cookies and doesn't show an ad when it wins an auction.

Thanks, this is cool, for a fiver I'm in.

Not many sites, but it's enough, will see how it goes. My main business news website is listed there, which is nice.

Edit: ok hang on was very confusing at first, hopefully someone at google has a look at the layout, really comes across as though you can only use the $5 for one website, but you have to add other sites you want.

Also unsure about recurring payments, that should be opt-in.

Just bought 500 articles. Awesome. What a ride!

Contributor page gave me a 404 trying to go to direct to the website I added.

Restarted browser, no ublock origin, the ads are still there. Ahh the folly of beta testing.

Good game. Will try later.

Re: Insane state of today's advertising part 3

#120

Post by teolandon »

ghughes wrote: post #27
allanbreyes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never quite understood why domain-blocking works so well for ad-blockers. I'm surprised why sites don't just use a reverse proxy or something to serve from those ad domains. What am I missing?

That's exactly what the adtech industry is starting to do. They've even got WordPress and Cloudflare plugins that can dynamically reinsert blocked ads via their proxy.

As long as I am able to block any element I want using my browser (and god help us if we reach a state where we can't), I won't have to look at any ad for more than 2 seconds. Any website that has too many ads to disable manually, or is in some way embedded with critical parts of the website is simply not worth my time.
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